Austrian psychoanlyst Sigmund Freud leaves Victoria Station after his arrival in London 1938. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Budding playwrights used to be warned by elderly critics that propaganda in the form of a play meant a certain failure in the theatre. The doctrine is one that needs a good deal of qualification even in the case of the play, and it is evidently quite discredited in the case of the film. Not very long ago a film was prepared in Germany to illustrate Professor Einstein's theory of relativity, and now we are told that "the first Freud film" has been displayed in Berlin. Psycho-analysis (though in a literary sense the cult now begins to wane) has crept more or less insidiously into our novels, but there is no question of a mere influence in this production of the German kinema; it is definite propaganda on behalf of the Freudian method of curing the ills the mind is heir to. It is rather interesting to think of Freud and Einstein both appealing to the Caesar of the kinema; there is a distinct suggestion (and probably a perfectly accurate one) that, nowadays, if you are not on the films you are not on the map. It is not, of course, to be supposed that eminent men of science think now in terms of the kinema; the invitation probably comes from the film experts, who, not having yet quite made up their minds what it is that they can properly do, are very anxious to try to do everything. The old cry that good propaganda is bad art does not seem to worry them at all. Perhaps they think that because they can advertise the kinema they can advertise anything; with all the enthusiasm of the young idea they aspire to science as readily as to "sob stuff." And, really, there is no reason why they should not - it is possible to arrange the most excellent demonstrations of what some sorts of science mean through the medium of the film. The only condition is that the film should be understandable and interesting, which is to say entertaining in the higher sense. But it must be observed that if the films can make psycho-analysis entertaining (except by accident) they will have done rather more for it than the novelists have so far accomplished.